The greatest opportunity

I don’t think technology is the problem here. It’s the teaching and development of ethics that are at fault.

The problem with rapidly-developing technology and journalistic ethics is that the technology is actually developing past journalism’s ethical development. Journalists have been developing ethical philosophies for since Americans were granted free speech – and they still haven’t perfected an absolute, widely-accepted philosophy, beyond “don’t plagiarize” and “don’t make things up.”

Rather than focus the discussion on journalistic ethics as applied to technology, the conversation should concern ethical basics. The problem is that we – not just as journalists, but as general people – don’t know how to deal with ethics. It’s just not something that everyone learns as they grow and mature. Even if our parents did teach us that it was wrong to lie, we didn’t learn much more than that: it was wrong and you’d get a spanking. We need to learn about ethics early, often and in context.

This applies to budding journalists, too. Perhaps journalism students should be required to take a full course on journalistic ethics, as opposed to discussing it in a few class periods of each journalism class we take. We should learn what ethics are early in our education and not wait to have these discussions until our final class in our final semester of study. And perhaps that course shouldn’t just be about journalistic ethics. To understand such a complex subject, we need to have broad understanding of how ethics apply to daily life. For example, is it okay to change the date and time of a late blog post to make it appear you turned it in on time? (Obviously, according to my ethics it is not.) It’s not just about how to make an ethical decision – we need to know the actual definition of “ethical” and how it relates to societal values and personal morals.

And, as both journalists and regular people, it needs to be okay when we make mistakes. No, you can’t constantly make bad decisions and expect to keep your job (or A+), but you should be able to make a slip up or two as you go. Just like technology, the components of ethical decision-making are ever-changing. It has to be okay to make some less-than-kosher ethical judgments, partly because we are always learning, partly because the situations are always changing and mostly because there is no universal correct answer.

Technology hasn’t created problems for this business; it’s created opportunities. Opportunities for 24-hour news services, Internet source databases, convergence of all news mediums. But the most important opportunity offered is the one that allows journalists to reassess our ethics – the process of decision-making, the teaching – and make true advances in perfection.